Time Team S16-E01 Beacon of the Fens: Warboys, The Fens

this mound is chapel head in Cambridgeshire Everest it ain't but to the locals it's a mountain jutting out of the flattened waterlogged fence over the years farmers working this field have found lots of stone loads of medieval tile even these two columns all this combined with the name has led to the local legend that this mound is the site of a medieval Chapel but it doesn't stop there they've also found these two prehistoric axes on this site so our job is to find out whether there ever was a chapel on chapel head and if this site held some kind of religious significance stretching back over for millennia on the other hand maybe the locals are just making a mountain out of a molehill the mounded chapel head lies at the end of a ridge of high ground protruding into the flat peat fens of east anglia during the medieval period this land was owned by ramsay a be one of five major monastic houses known as defend five the funny thing about this round is is only a few meters high yeah and yet it really dominates the landscape of place people would have used any period in the past nothing for a chapel all sorts of things but a chapel certainly yeah and of course we've got this wonderful fun yeah this is a Shelley limestone possibly quarried in the barnak area they stopped coring this around 1,500 and this is sort of stuff that Ramsey Abbey would have been built off what do you think of the air photo Frances well the air photos extraordinary oz you can see the top of the hill is encircled by this seer Rhee ditch now to my eye that ring ditch could be medieval but it looks much more like something creosote yeah are we over 240 and of course they found the prehistoric axis here yeah yes yes and they are very early those it looks like we've got thousands of years of history to investigate so there's no time to lose geophysics Stewart begin their surveys to locate the possible prehistoric ring ditch and a potential medieval Chapel this is a typical collection of the stones we take off the field when we were farming it we're feeling pretty confident about our second target thanks to mark England's family who farm the mound for over a century and unearthed a lot of intriguing stonework yeah well none of this is local to the area this is all brought in this is a limestone it comes from around the Peterborough area which is good 20 miles yeah how many of these little heaps are there at least half a dozen along this ditch line presumably people been doing this for generations I know that for a fact because our grandfather took a lot off the field right and they actually pulled the back wall of a little cottage with it up in the village film the good news is that all this stone looks very much like it could have come from a chapel John have you got this chapel then the bad news is the GF is a struggling to get any results at all through the wet clay I'm not really seeing anything no sign of a building and no sign of this big ditch so we're gonna have to find this boy the conventional the old boy what do you reckon then well they're two things really no it's also got this very good effort yeah and the other thing is is a platform that it's there it's not a natural feature that's artificial so I think that's worth investigating as well in case that's the the sides of this possible Chapel so we're opening two trenches based on Stuart's survey the first one looking for a potential medieval Chapel and the other further down the slope hunting for a prehistoric ring ditch do a good like two or three inches I think in see the kind of range what it looks like at the moment and the early signs are also pretty good up at Phil's possible Chapel trench always present on earth title of a do look a medieval Chapel might be as simple as a small rectangular building orientated east-west out of it so it could be quite easy to miss portal sure yes and you've got glaze on it and stuff but the quantity of tile in the topsoil does look promising that's definitely medieval although we're investigating two different periods of history I'm assured by veteran fens Minh Francis Pryor that they're part of the same story a story of religious activity going back thousands of years to you that probably doesn't look like much of a hill it's virtually flat but to offend them you know it's for teachers and around it that would have been water and then it would have been very dramatic was it would have looked like an island surrounded by an inland sea wall my seas have been used for well very often these high islands on the edge of the fan were special religious sacred places and I wouldn't be surprised if the ditch that we know goes around the crown of the hill was originally dug in short segments that is a pipe of monument which goes back to the very beginnings of the nearly with what inside it well I think in the centre there could have been a barrow an ancestral grave yo and then somewhat later the short lengths of dish were probably redone to form a hen as another sort of ceremonial monument that was destructed around 2500 BC like I say isn't it yes it's an exciting theory but to prove it we'll need to find two phases of Ring ditch in Matt's trench little bit journalism Oh and it's looking hopeful process yeah have a look at this two things firstly this just cutting out the topsoil oh yeah what's that there princess it's a Neolithic flake and what's diagnostic is this that shows that it came off four core that's where they bashed it off a bigger lump of lead without much dug right yeah we've got um some pot as well if he's recognized with it can you see down here it's all very fragmented I look at it very very soft yeah yeah I thought it's charcoal at first but um if you look it's got the coming it's got inclusions and stuff in it well it's certainly prehistoric it could be almost anything from Neolithic to Iron Age I think it's potentially very exciting this if this is a prehistoric ring ditch it could be related to the flint axes that Marc's father found on the mound this thing just blows me away I haven't seen an axe like this for about 20 years this absolutely pure black beautiful quality Flint this is this is I mean if you could break that out mice we're blowing it and say grooms graves running through the middle I could stick a rock they last pretty much the most famous Flint mine site in Britain yeah well this is it this is a fantastic thing as well the finish on it it's just so beautiful yeah but you see this is a stone axe and Oates we're blowing that this is from the Lang dales the Lake District so let's come from a lot further away but I've been the same date yep their boat well for 4000 BC through to say two and a half thousand what it demonstrates is that we are definitely got nearly thick occupation on this hill these axes were heavy-duty tools used for anything from felling trees to constructing a hinge so we're gonna need more fines from features like our ring ditch to help us work out what was going on here back up the hill we're still trying to find out if a chapel stood here five thousand years later and while Jeff is continue to search oh I think we yeah we got some sort of the Sherpas here me Phil's on to something well you got something there yeah we look so we got cobbles or something like that here Tony but it's going right the way across but you don't know how to cobbled floor to a chapel I'm a nobody only might have commas around it or you might have paths going up to it and not only that we've got this lovely piece of medieval floor tol well I mean that's gonna be sort of 13th 14th century and it's a sort of it goes with a stone chapel or Church he's not likely to turn up on anything else alright that's the medieval we haven't got the prehistoric down here I'll tell you one thing what's that television is great at pictures when it's useless at temperature isn't it it is because it's absolutely freezing it it's almost unbelievable that anyone would want to build a chapel up there knowing that you get these kind of temperatures this is getting really exciting this is Francis what about this trench what we got here well we thought the ditch you know the big ditch that goes around the whole site was down there yeah well actually it's moved up the hill it's there but what's fascinating about it is that it's sealed beneath that dark layer high above it and that's had some late stuff in it but have we got anything that actually dates our ditch um yes we've got for example this piney Mesolithic Flint though I mean that could be 6,000 BC and we've got a Neolithic flake we've got bronze or Iron Age pottery we've also got we've got railing you got some anglo-saxon I mean we got the full right we've got everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to date you know because this was such an important place but let's not get carried away we still need to get to the bottom of the ditch to tell us when it was dug and what it was for my season last as a child cult I assume it's actually sitting on top yeah that there's there's our cobble surface back up the hill films now certainly hasn't found a chapel but something more domestic two three we could be about three to four meters across and this could be a half base of something like asteroid and all this means that Stuart's found some sort of settlement and not a chapel you haven't seen this I know I'm go but John's finally got some results what they tell me where it's a chapel sighs yeah quite convincing looks promising and it where is that yeah what is it well it's under our feet how far away's louder well it's far enough to miss the it looks like ice is worth digging doesn't it Victor well I I don't want to eat my words that's as close to a yes as we're gonna get so our third trench goes in to find out if John's found us a chapel that sound it's don't like her dude to take it back from there it's a child coming up and bridge and Tracy are rapidly getting into promising-looking archaeology it's a nice watery spread isn't it yeah and look at Bangor another boundary Bangor with the Jones liners if this is a chapel in makes you wonder who used it on this freezing lonely hill our research has revealed that in medieval times our mound belonged to the manner of Wolvie which was owned by one of the great monasteries Ramsey Abbey well we've got this fantastic document here this is a land transfer from 1535 so just before the dissolution of the monasteries and it is fantastically hard to read but here we can see Wolvie and it says that the manner of Wolvie pertaining to the firm Arras office of the foresaid monastery which is Ramsey so that's the infirmaries office what was an inn thermic he was the official in the master that looked after the infirmary which is where the sick and old monks went so it was like a doctor yes except he wouldn't have had the skills of a doctor beyond you know things like come herbs and so on what might an infirmary I've been doing a rail mound well he may have just drawn an income from leasing the land out or of course there might have been a Grange there a monastic farm but also of course it may have been the place where something like bloodletting was done so if we do have a chapel it could be just part of the medieval story and we should be on the lookout for a Grange or possibly some kind of hospital and we also need to work out how Phil's structure fits into the picture fell yo way ive speedran rummage in your fine strike a finite bit of pot it's quite early in medieval terms you might even be looking at the end of the Saxon period just for the Norman Conquest really yeah they start making that stuff round about a and I go suit about 1150 no later than that really looking at the fabric on how I'm pretty sure I've seen other pot very similar to this from this trench I think that's quite early medieval occupation really is and we're looking like anyway so this is potentially very exciting because it could mean that there was an early ecclesiastical settlement here about the time that Ramsay Abbey was founded and that's something you don't find every day the news isn't so good down in Matt's trench where the prehistoric ring ditch Francis was so sure he'd found seems to have disappeared Matt thinks the crop mark has been caused by the gray layer which they found earlier I'm Rick I'm going for that I think well as the ditch your most ear know but Francis isn't convinced sorry wouldn't make a crop mark like that's something I don't know a meter two meters deep makes a mark that not a little smear hmm okay well wish find out we will I'll be right if Francis is wrong his dream of finding a prehistoric henge could lie in tatters but it's a much rosier outlook for the chapel hunters filling his trench has got cobbles we've got something quite different we've got limestone rubble that could be collapsed walling this is either a robbed out wall or could be a surface and and we've got glazed tiles as well take a look at John's new geophys this is here where we think the chapel is look at this rectangle around it what's going on in here we'll find out tomorrow beginning of day two here at chapel head in Cambridgeshire where we're looking for surprise surprise a lost Chapel and we've certainly found something Chapel like down here which is getting everybody quite excited but it must be a bit of a disappointment fulfilled because yesterday he put in our first trench over here looking for the chapel and you missed it by our four metres in your money haha we might not have found the chapel but look what we have found inadvertently we've actually located the trench slap-bang on what is probably the biggest geophysical anomaly around this enclosure ditch so that your physical anomaly was presumably that patch of cobbles there it's a mixture of the cobbles and all the masses are burning and we got there I think what it is is probably building debris that's just been flung into the top of the ditch the ditch looks like it's some sort of perimeter around a chapel and fields already found some pottery which could date it to the Saxon period it could be very early then yeah what might be in the middle of it well if this is a chapel and we said I've resolved that I wouldn't surprise me if there weren't burials with it and that's all there might be a second one no minutes do I hear some sceptical snorts from my right hand as possible don't think it's a bit big mate just to be an enclosure around a chat another chapel and not if it's important early on so where we gonna put the French I mean this is the perimeter we're talking about but we've also got this possible enclosure here I mean I think we ought to investigate both of those then we can get some dating evidence out and see if they're all the same sort of period so Traci puts a new trench in across two enclosure ditches a small curved one and a big rectangular one looking for debris from an earlier classical settlement lease no they just found this lovely little thing we know it's LED we think it might be some kind of seal and it definitely got letters around it has to work that down to hell and see if you can work out precisely what it is where did you get it Jason I found in this apartment spool here which is roughly about where the Spidey's customized your day oh yeah well with the cold winds this intriguing find came out of bridges Chappell trench which fill has now gatecrashed and I would big fall then we go right the way across a wall and kid about just putting it back of main Reagan and do any good at all your thank me for this bridge rely yeah it looks like most of the stone has been rubbed away leaving clay and gravel foundations but we really need is evidence to prove this is a chapel and not some other medieval building wow what a brilliant find and we're hoping the lead find can help the bottom valid seal toy bottom I think what's a date is it well these ones with just a name on a thirteenth century and in fact something like this could have been used to seal a documentary in very like putting a signature on it or educating it I mean you can you can see some of the letters look this one here this kind of backwards spiral now that kind of like that that is a G and that's backwards because you've read it an impression Helens going to try and work out the name of the person who dropped their seal on this chilly mound overlooking the fens 800 years ago when we first arrived here we were presented with this beautiful air photo with this circular feature round our mound which all the archaeologists were pretty sure was a prehistoric ditch so we put this trench in to find it and sure enough Francis found it but he seems to have had one of his senior moments because you've lost your ditch Avenue I have Tony yes look we originally thought that this dark band here was the ditch but then it's too slight to in substantial then we got an accurate plot of the air photos and that showed that the ditch should be running through up this end of the trench so we dug a hole and we couldn't find it and then we were cleaning up a section here when we found this dark shape here which is undoubtedly the ditch except as a problem follow me because when you come round here from this side it's not there how can you have half a ditch well it's either stopping in the middle of the trench or it isn't a ditch at all it's a pit and the only way we all know that is by putting another trench over here on the other side of the spoil him so Frances opens a new trench to see if the ditch continues if it does it should give us fines that can tell us what was happening here thousands of years ago if it doesn't it's back to the drawing board in comparison the search for a chapel seems to be going swimmingly finish that bridge that's what I'm thinking those notion it just sort of fleshy glaze is nice it's got a real green ocean tinge to it doesn't it crack in LA not only are the finds promising but Helens made a discovery gone back to what I was working on yesterday which is this land transfer document she's found a reference to a chapel in the manner of Wolvie which is being leased to a farmer by the infirmary of ramsay abbey they're granting a certain amount of resource to the new lessee with some exceptions he doesn't seem to be able to use the whole offering that shall be offered to the said place or Chapel now that seems to imply that that Chapel has got to be part of the manor what is if it's here doesn't it yeah I think that's the key proof at last that there was a chapel here in the 16th century and that Ramsay Abbey was taking an income from it normally God and its shape could tell us how important a Chapel it was just pull that back of that sort of lab order thought a million in the ground the simplest Chapel might show up as just a single cell more important ones might have a chancellor at the holy end and possibly even an apse and if you're really lucky the West End might have a bell tower earlier today Tracy put a new trench in across two enclosure ditches that might be related to the chapel but the smaller one now seems to be prehistoric is that nice wee bit hmm that looks early Bronze Age to me sort of domestic type pottery mmm ah cooking pot so that suggests that we've got something new that we haven't had before on this site and that is prehistoric settlement okay one piece of pot doesn't make a site but two pieces ah yeah I think you got a kitchen excellent despite lots of random finds this is the first sign of where prehistoric people were living on this mound and one thing our Bronze Age cooks would have had in common with their medieval counterparts apart from frostbite would have been a diet of eels in fact there were so many that they used to use them as currency people actually paid their tithes with eels and even today there are still people who earn their living in the eel industry Peter how long has your family been involved with eels they've been on the fence 500 years and we know that definitely trapped 200 years of them using these kinds of traps yep the traditional eel hi what you've got this end is you got a chair the idea is eels can make the way in yeah but they can't return because the way their spikes held in was when's the good time to catch them here we usually start from being grateful and the old saying goes when the willow comes in the bad deals come out the money and we track right through see in the october/november when I start hard night again well the willows are just about beginning to blood now they are yes so we might be lucky what are we gonna bait our trap with rocío anything which is good and smelly one of the old favourite ones you spin old dead cat and what you do is have a thing of the dead cat is they smell like no other animal and what you do is you bear in the garden a few days until the neighbors start moaning then you know it's time to put it out and what you do is you put it for an old-fashioned blender or something similar to mush it up and then put it in let's err thank you for sharing that with us you're welcome rest assured there's not a dead cat inside we're using rotting fish you don't catch a saucer moves you Oh show me Houston which is quite smelly enough thank you these hides are the same as prehistoric your men would have used and they'd have set them in a vast network of tidal rivers sneaking around our Mound the shadows of which remain today I'd oh lovely back on the mound the finds from Phil's trench suggests he's definitely found our chapel so really we've got like two phases of pottery here we've got quite an early phase which is what 12th maybe into 13th yeah and we got this stuff which is 15th into 16 covered it looks quite posh as well cuz I mean we've got these bits a LED window cane so we got glazed windows those windows of course and then we got all this glazed floor so yes you think this is quite light yeah well the the later medieval tell tends to be one color only the dark one or a light one so you get the contrasting mosaic effect like so like a checkerboard or exactly and a lot more common in later 40 to 15th century so if you got all these tiles this place must about a major makeover sometime the 15th century the windows and tiles are great details for reconstructing the final phase of the chapel and although we know that it was part of the manner of Wolvie we've been trying to find out exactly what that means so Stuart's been surveying an old causeway connecting our mound to a field full of earthworks on the other side of the road and even that little indent there is shown is exactly the same and he's noticed that the lumps and bumps echo patterns in some of the earliest maps I was using I get excited by her throws so I did a sketch survey of those if you put that next to it there's the causeways the double banked causeway very clear feature in this field of which I'm calling the lumpy fields it's full of lumps and bumps this enclosure here is this one and this is a classic medieval motored enclosure and within it you can see the remains of where buildings are being located I'm convinced that this is a medieval mana site so it's a classic Manor and Chapel isn't it the only reason it looks peculiar is because we've got this causeway which you wouldn't need anywhere other than in this little bit of landscape that's right usually a private chapel would be within the moated complex unless it was used by a wider congregation or predated the manor lovely job the only way we'll find this out is by further excavation do you want have another smear down there I want to see if there's any buttresses to so phase opened up the West End fete you've got that West War yet certainly half fill um but we seem to have two of them do west walls one where the lads are working there and one here I strange it must be a cloakroom I'm off see you later as well as trying to get to grips with this strange layout we want to find out the origins of the chatter yeah on our side we've got pottery dating to the Saxon period when Ramsay abbey was founded and set about accumulating land and wealth we know that Ramsay Abby is really voracious at acquiring the relics of saints and there are other people a pinch from churches and east anglia they've gone out they've got their the bones and the scores I've taken them back to the abbey that attracts pilgrims pilgrims bring Monday especially as it has been miracles or something like that so where the abbey is making money so it's possible that they knew that being a hermit on a site like this they may even have acquired the relics from here we don't have the documents for that it's quite a possibility up here this afternoon where it's so cold and bleak you can see why a really masochistic hermit would like to live up here guardian the trouble with Hermits is that they don't leave much behind them so if there was a hermitage here it'll be difficult to find for two days Francis has been trying to find a prehistoric ring ditch to prove that this mound has been a religious site for thousands of years but the archaeology isn't playing ball it's stunning were 13th 14th century made in the north and north hands it's a funny-looking thing and it looks like a lot of cheeky Sparrow it was cut a face on it a little dome in a series of these all around the rim of the jug and then slip stripes coming down below them it's been interpreted so stylized dancing girls would party pottery it's a nice smiley face yeah it's not cute but what I tell you I mean much as I love the smiley face what really irritates me is that we found it in a ditch down there and we've been looking for a prehistoric ditch I'm afraid that's not even remotely prehistoric the party pot is a bombshell for Francis's theory that this crop mark was a prehistoric ring ditch but Stewart's got a replacement theory that what we've actually got is a medieval bank all around the mound now white shows up like this is we've got the slope coming down the hill like that and in the medieval period and banks been raised on it and then moisture gets trapped behind it not a vast amount of moisture but enough to cause the dark stain on the photograph which we thought might be a big ditch just moisture against the bank the bank gets plowed away and what's left comes out is that the white circle around the edge so what we've got is a medieval circular enclosure something which goes with the manor site which is in the lumpy field over the road it's like an enclosure either for animals or a mini park even but it's firmly medieval in day I mean it's a frustrating end today - for Francis as he attempts to find an explanation for the prehistoric finds on the site luckily the news is better in our Chapel trench I think he's coming on really well you can see the outline of this rectangular building round their background there which would give us a sort of fairly bog-standard Chapel you'd expect to find on a monastic estate but it's beginning to get more complicated in one way over where Phil's walking wheel up see if we've got another wall going off Sal where's using them all might be well you see we got clay here but then when we get into here we've got whacking great stones so it looks like it's running through here so if it is a wall what would that imply well it sort of implies that there's something on the East End of this main block of the church so it gives us a sort of to sell plan and that's much more like you'd get with a sort of early parish church a sort of church that belongs to a manor house and of course we've got the manor house we think in the field next door so end of day two and we may have what it refers to as a bog-standard chapels or maybe we've got something more complex and more high status could this in fact have been the center of worship for the whole area we'll find out tomorrow beginning day 3 here in Chapel heading Cambridgeshire and the sun's out looks like we found our medieval Chapel everything's rosy except it looks like our prehistoric story has completely fallen to pieces yesterday we thought we had a Bronze Age ditch all the way round our mount but now has turned out to be many evil which means that basically your last two days has been a complete waste of time there's no Francis well yeah you could say that totem but we know that this site had a lot of prehistoric fines on it these two fine axes we've got Bronze Age pottery we've got lots of Neolithic plates you've even got a Mesolithic Flint um but you know these things weren't dropped out of the B cover of a low-flying Heron if they had to have been put here by people so what are you gonna do to try and establish what prehistoric features there are here well I'm gonna start somewhere on the crown of this hill because if I'd been a Bronze Age person and I had to bury my grandfather I'd put him in a barrow on the top of this hill this is a very very commanding place so with only a day left Francis dispatches Matt to look for traces of grandpas burial mound this is the student head of folding things then what are we doing steward searching for prehistoric features in the landscape to do its equivalent of dowsing and trace is exposing a bit more of the enclosure where she found Bronze Age pottery yesterday and John's come up with a striking geophysical anomaly which he thinks is worth a punt okay our big success has been revealing our medieval Chapel which is now looking a tad more complicated than we were expecting Faye's found two walls in the West and a series of round pits we've got one here we've got one over there yeah one over there and possibly also something else happening over here some of these pits really do look rather round they do don't leave we've got these kind of dark round splotches one theory is these could be pits from a bell tower why would you need pits in a bell tower because it's somewhere for the ropes for the bells to go into so this could be something really exciting a bell tower on the end of our Chapel huh that would be nice to find it will be fantastic the sound of the Bell could have echoed across the fence summoning people to prayer but it's more common on a parish church than a private chapel right on man and Phil's expanding the East End to trace the wall line he found yesterday which might be a chancel or an apse if you just get a little bit more curvature that would be enough to prove it will Maori parents you're a straight coat I speak of it a curve would mean we've got an apse and proved that this was once an important little Church I think that is a wall which is pretty something earlier we put a trench in across this geophysical anomaly because John had a hunch it might be something prehistoric I think what we've got is an in situ burnt wattle and daub structure brilliant I mean if you look at some of this stuff that's in this in the tray I mean look at that that's fantastic you can really see there with the walls have burnt out of the door and look at that face I mean that's a wall interesting thing is I got Ian to put a little box in at the end of the trench just to see where the natural was and the Naturals remember the six inches are so down I mean this could be standing about a foot high oh it's unheard of because like normally all you get is like a beam slot or a few post holes but this looks like the actual remains of the timber structure in situ medieval I would guess so I mean it's gotta be medieval or earlier if it's what Linda doesn't it could be a pretty big structure I mean we've taken a trench through there there's five meters going that way and 10 meters this way oh it could be a long house or something a long house was a farm building housing both humans and animals and medieval one should be easy to date as it would be full of pottery finds a prehistoric one would probably be pretty barren this kind of building usually only survives as postholes but what's extraordinary here is that fire has actually preserved the clay in the walls unfortunately at the top of the mound max drawn a blank in his search for a prehistoric bear oh it looks like what I thought we might something here like that what do you do you've got the reason why there's no archaeology at the top of the hill these things are the subsoil Pharaohs right farmer left here and that's why the archeology has been turned on and destroyed yeah it was a lot of work to find a few plough marks but at least we now know why there's nothing at the top of the hill the upside of the plowing is that it's turned over a lot of masonry which looks like it's come from the chapel now what about this column now I am I am off early so this is one because I really think I'm really look slightly different in in color but that's just the lichen isn't it yes the size is it's pretty good also what you notice is it's it's completely round it's not being built into a wall yes it's obviously not architectural is it no we're looking at detail with this I don't know bussiness Adelia is something something like that even the supports for a font maybe yeah the ideal for a font it's the right height roughly like me this would have been a pretty posh font and more evidence for our chapel being a parish church for the surrounding community you're actually just just show as a vague mark and to add weight to this theory Phil thinks he can just see an apps coming through you see that that oranjee grounder these bits of oranjee gravel they're just the same as the gravel that's in this main in the main foundation trenches it's going to be painstaking work to find out if this really is an ass but they say patience is a virtue and Helens hard work on the lead seal we found yesterday has paid off we used a bit of electronic trickery by scanning it and flipping the image and from that you can you can see quite well that there's well the end is a bit hard to see but then the a the LD gif is quite clear but we're missing the top half of it here so I drew that out to see how much room we had left there's only two names really that that end in now there's Reginald and his Arnold the just isn't room for Reggie here so I've put in R which gives us room for the s as well seal of Arnold and then the gif could be two surnames either Giffen or gifford so if there is an Arnold Gifford or Arnold Giffen out there who's lost their seal how old would he be by now Oh about seven eight hundred years old yeah when arms dropped his seal the manor was owned by the infirmary of Ramsay Abbey who was responsible for the sick and elderly monks and it's a fair bet that some of his remedies used either skin pain I don't yesterday Pete's the last ill man in Ely not nothing that one set some traps using a design that hasn't changed in 10,000 years not alone no no nothing yet this is the last one but there's nothing in here a whole experiment it turns to ashes nothing I bet there's a back-up plan there is indeed a back-up plan these were bought by our researcher from an eel and pie shop in Shepherds Bush the day before we came here medieval doctors used eel skin in all manner of cures for ear infections boils and even hair loss it's not easy skin is time Oh what do you move but skinning an eel is easier said than done I've heard the blood of these is toxic is that my right Peter yeah they've said in modern studies that the old blood is highly poisonous other cockney bloods coursing through my veins the genes isn't it one of the more unlikely remedies involve wrapping eel skin around a lady stomach until it dried and tightened Oh apparently this was a cure for hysteria look at a beautiful job oh thank goodness for medical advances oh yes very good I think you ought to but you would have thought that after thousands of years of eel fishing someone would have worked out a better way to skin them meanwhile there's good news back on the mound where Francis's desperate search for a prehistoric settlement is finally getting somewhere Frances can I come in your trench yeah shorten this here is what we've been calling the Bronze Age settlement ditch isn't it that's right yes is it Bronze Age and is it settlement yes I think it's both Bronze Age and a settlement I think it's Bronze Age because we've got two good pieces of Bronze Age pottery out of it there and then we've been getting burning and burnt bone and possible cremation but I'm not sure out of it down there so that but you know that looks like settlement to me um but this ditch here which cuts through it this darker one this shadow along here yeah that's the one yeah now this stitch is part of the large rectangular enclosure which goes right across the top of the site that produced a Roman tile from quite close to the top in that dark thinning you can see intersection there so that means that the ditch was open when that tile was knocking around it could be Iron Age if I'm right then this Hill was occupied about a thousand years before the chapel was built Francis decides to put in one more trench around the enclosure to find out if it is Iron Age we've got to go for him we're running out of time and he's only got a couple of hours left he's looking for pottery to prove that the Iron Age saw the first major settlement of the mound after sporadic Bronze Age occupation outside the enclosure we've exposed more of the burnt wattle and daub building which the archaeologists are suggesting could be a long house we're having a problem getting any sort of data out of it so the rest of the site is covered in medieval pottery and we haven't got any here no nothing the longer that goes on that's likely it is that this is a medieval structure and the more likelihood that it might be earlier ah so perhaps even for your story the lack of fines suggests it could possibly be a Bronze Age longhouse and if so it's an incredibly well-preserved and important find but sadly we can't prove it we're pretty sure it's nothing to do with the chapel though we're films feeling the pressure of trying to work out if he's got an apse while also digging below the 12th century foundations hunting for an earlier building got to keep banging that back and let's see the thing in plan sorry but there is no there's no there's no there's no to act two ways about it there's no point in going down till we've gone open get back to your own old man the pottery find so far suggests that the stone chapel was built in the 12th century during the civil wars of the reign of Stephen and Matilda and this was a turbulent time for Ramsey Abbi Ramsey particularly wasn't doing very well because it had to Abbott that who nobody could agree who the Abbott was supposed to be so all their lands weren't being managed well and then on top of that we have a very tricky local Baron around here Jeffrey demander will who's in dispute with King Stephen and in the middle of all these troubles he goes into Ramsey happy and makes it his power base for a revolt in the fens really he pillages Ely he sacks Cambridge he terrorizes the land around mrs. Shaka Lord it is yes maybe evil shopping or it's just possible that demand ovals sent his heavies to Chapel head because we found evidence of burning from this period dumped in the enclosure ditch Francis are you doing but Francis believes that the origins of the enclosure are much much earlier that's your part is it yeah it's not much and it's not very exciting as it that's okay at Shelley were which narrows it down to Iron Age Roman Saxon on medieval good having an expert hope you look at it actually it's it's off a base can you see the way and that's just curving up there yeah yeah now it's a flat base you don't get flat bases on Shelley words in the Saxon or medieval period so it's got to be either Iron Age or Roman the position of this tiny bit of pot in the top of the ditch convinces Francis that the Iron Age saw the first major settlement of the hill and although we've got fines going back to the Mesolithic it seems the first people to live here did so in the Bronze Age and the mound was probably a special place throughout history right up to the building of the church come down look at my church Senate yeah having gone along with this absolutely crack it yeah they then you know this morning we add an apse yeah how does a chance of stroke you Oh that'll be fine haps yeah look you can just see the traces of the foundation trench in that section and it comes along there and then here we've got the turn of it yeah and it comes along here and that is our chance you remind me why Chancellor's again that's the eastern end of the church as the altar it's a sort of priests sin as opposed to the the nave the other end which is where the congregational so here's our chancel and here is the wall that divides the chancel from the nave yeah but look what we've got down then crikey we've got a beam slot or summat like that much earlier but running parallel with that wall so lots of the significance of that it's obviously a very much earlier building or a church Church hang on this chapel we reckons early Normand oh yeah so could that thing be saxon yeah I mean this could be a Saxon timber Church replaced by the stone building on the top so this could have been the church at the centre of an earlier religious community that Mick was looking for if so sometime after the Norman Conquest Ramsey a be rebuilt the wooden Church in stone a couple of centuries later in the 15th century it was renovated and became part of the moated manorial complex Stewart found in the field next door actually to find a chapel on a hill called chapel head may not be that surprising but this is a rare and important find from the first occupants of this area in the neolithic through to the late medieval every generation has left faint traces but this chapel is somehow more it represents an abbey staking claim to territory it was an outpost of Christianity and it was a landmark 800 years ago when this whole place was watery and forbidding it must have been a very reassuring sight tomorrow on 4 dispatches investigates whether the war on terror is having some unexpected side effects Pakistan's Taliban generation at 8:00 tonight now though in half an hour a banquet fit for a king Heston's got a maybe he will feast and after the news which is next you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 427,726

Rating: 4.8680296 out of 5

Keywords: Time, Team, Full, Episodes, Season, Timeteam, Archaeological, Sites, Serie, argeologie, archaeological

Id: yTp7HF-k7BM

Length: 48min 10sec (2890 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2013